Contents

Why create blogs?

Blogs are different than a typical article in that they are not intended to be collaboratively written pieces of content, but instead a single user's composition. The idea is to give people a different way to express themselves in their community.

Some examples of why a user would write a blog article instead of a traditional wiki article are to write:

Fan fiction or original work on an otherwise canon community

Op-eds or tell personal stories

Articles that pose questions and solicit responses

Reviews, suggestions or recommendations

Of course, it's entirely up to each community to decide how it gets used and which of these are allowed locally.

Creating a blog post

Click the "Create Blog Post" button at the top of this tab. This will open an editing screen.

Create your blog post as though you were creating any other page. The only difference is that this one will be attributed entirely to you.

Enable or disable commenting

Decide if you want to allow comments by checking or unchecking the "Commenting" checkbox above the edit summary.

Click "Preview" to review your work.

Click "Publish" to share your blog post with the rest of your community.

Return to the "Blog" tab on your profile to see a list of all of your blog posts.

Leaving a comment

Leave a comment on a blog post - source editor

When viewing a blog post, scroll down to the area just below the blog post, and click the commenting field.

Leave a comment on a blog post - visual editor

A comment area will load. Use the tools available to add a comment. Depending on your preferences, you either use a visual editor by default or a source editor by default. If you use visual as default, you can switch to source mode by clicking the brackets icon on the left.

Click "Post Comment" to add your comment to the page.

Additional details

Edit rights

A blog post can be edited by the author of the post or an admin on the wiki. Other users do not have access to edit a blog post.

Deleting comments

Admins can delete comments using a delete link, shown next to the comment's timestamp. In addition, when a blog post is deleted, all associated comments will be deleted.

Blog listing pages

These allow you to quickly create a page containing a list of blog posts by category. You can create a new blog listing at Special:CreateBlogListingPage.

Note that blog listings do not update immediately upon creation of a new blog post. You can wait for the cache to clear (a couple of hours), or add ?action=purge to the URL of the listing page.

Blog:Recent posts exists on all wikis with blog posts enabled, listing all the recent blog posts on the wiki.

Embedded bloglists

A tag is available to allow you to embed a list of blogs within a normal article. There are a number of parameters you can define to format the embedded list to fit within different content pages - e.g. the main page, the community portal, a contest page, etc. - and it is extremely customizable. For more information on how to use this, see Help:Blogs/Bloglist.